1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for sharing data between resources. Specifically, the method involves providing meta data definitions for data processing of data objects.
2. Description of Related Art
Many applications utilize data that has been formatted a particular way. When se another application requires the same data, a second application may attempt to retrieve that data from a first application. Unfortunately, the second application may require the data in a different format than that used by the first application. For example, one organization might identify the submitter of a help desk incident by the submitter's customer number while another organization might use the submitter's physical location or local area network (LAN) address. The different data formats expected by the different applications present a obstacle to the efficient sharing of data between applications.
Traditionally, making a change to an application to accommodate this type of difference would involve changing the source code or data structures which describe the object (and possibly other code) and then regenerating the application. The traditional update method implies the availability of the source code and creates a need to maintain the changed source code. Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus to share data between different applications.